by Yoram Kaniuk
A week later Sandy was discharged, and I said that the story would make a great movie and she agreed and we decided to write a television play based on it. She said that since she’d just gotten out of the hospital she didn’t feel up to writing just yet, but she’d put her name on whatever I came up with. So I wrote the synopsis and she sent it to Playhouse 90 and one day she came to my apartment naked, a bottle of whiskey in her hand, shouting, Do you remember Hughie and the boy? Yes, I replied. Joyously she announced, I’ve sold the adaptation I did of your adaptation to Playhouse 90! I was in shock. After about a month however they rejected what she’d written because it was too realistic, too depressing. I guessed she’d taken out Hughie’s black humor and they said she’d basically done The Snake Pit II without the love, the jealousy, the humor, and I decided I’d had enough of her, but I felt bad for her, and even though she’d hurt me I thought I had to save her and get her married off so she’d have a chance at staying alive. She had suffered so much and I thought she deserved something good in her life.
I had a friend, Steve Scheuer. He was the founder and owner of the TV Key column that gave the week’s television program times as well as cast and crew, recommendations, a bit of gossip, and so forth. The column was a real success story. Steve’s father, a Jewish emigrant, had dreamed of the country whose streets were paved with gold. Well, the gold wasn’t on the streets, but at times he earned well and at others not so well. One day he was walking down what’s now Park Avenue. The trains would rumble out of Grand Central Station, escaping New York. The buildings on both sides of the enormous, black, soot-covered area were in awful shape. And the noise from the trains was very loud. He stood there and asked himself, America? Is this what happens in America? And he decided that it was indeed America and that the trains would eventually be put into tunnels, a subway, and he borrowed money, some from his relatives, he mortgaged his home, bought a few pieces of land for what now seems like peanuts. A few years later the trains were indeed put into tunnels, Park Avenue became Park Avenue, and now on his land you’ve got the Waldorf-Astoria and so forth and so on; this guy, I thought, beat the house, not just the table. And it was his son Steve, who was shy and polite and goodhearted and a good friend, that I decided to marry Sandy off to. She was crazy enough for an introverted, charming, unsuspecting guy like Steve. I introduced them. They hit it off. They had a son. They lived on Eighty-seventh Street and fought sometimes, she naked with a knife and he with a breadboard and lots of shouting and her older kids and their son would hide and somebody once called me to intervene. Sandy was covered in blood, I poured a bottle of whiskey over her, and so on and so forth. Gandy wrote me that I shouldn’t do favors like that to any of his enemies. Sandy said she was writing a proposal to city hall on how to teach eighth graders in elementary school how to take off bras. Speaking from her own experience, she said, if you could cut down on the time it takes for an excited boy to open a bra, which are all made differently, and the girl is sitting there trembling, it would save them trouble for the rest of their lives, just think of all the problems they’ll never have. She was writing, she said, such a proposal, and was looking for people with contacts in the education system. I told her I didn’t have any. She said, But you need the course more than anyone!
Lee was still with the out-of-town production, now in Boston. Oved called one night and his voice was screechy, pitiful, remote, he said, I can make only one call. Listen. Hanoch isn’t home, I’m stuck on some island, there’s no way out, it’s like Ellis Island but for Mexicans, there’s one guy who’s been here since the Indian Wars, it’s terrible here, call Hanoch, he’s sure to be home soon, get hold of Brando to put up five hundred bucks’ bail so I can get out of here, and he hung up. I called Hanoch. I told him. He knew about the island. Next day Oved called again, but this time he used our system, a person-to-person call for Mr. Hakol Beseder. (“Everything’s OK.”) The operator asked him to spell it, he spelled it, and then he said, if Mr. Hakol Beseder isn’t available he’d speak to Mr. Echtov Machar (“I’ll write tomorrow”). She asked him to spell it, and he said, No, no, actually, I have to speak with Mr. Oved Yatzah. (“Oved’s on his way.”) It took half an hour but I got the message.
Two weeks later Oved reached New York. Lee was on her way home from Boston. Oved told me that Shpilke, who had been in Mexico, had found Laundromat tokens there you could buy in packs of a thousand for a dollar and they were just the same size and weight as quarters. He’d brought some along to New York. Hordes of Israelis were suddenly standing at public phones and calling home, their friends, Café Kassit, Paris, all over the world, until the phones filled up with the tokens and got jammed. The Americans checked, realized what was going on, and brought in a few Hebrew-speaking girls to the Bell Telephone Company. Two weeks later, our Israeli system was a thing of the past. I asked Oved about the island and why he’d been there, that island you called from. He asked, Remember the car in the desert? With that cop? So I went back to get the car. At the bus station there wasn’t a bus going to Mojave, but there was one going to Mexico City. In Mexico City I ran into Harry Gemora and we went back to Los Angeles. I asked, What about the island? Oved said, All my stamps didn’t work at the border this time and I was caught like a Mexican and taken to the island. There are people there who’ve been locked up for years. Scary. I said I understood now. That it was entirely logical.
I told him that Lee wanted to leave me and he said it was a shame, come to LA with me for two weeks, get over your broken heart and we’ll find something to do. I’ve got an idea, that’s why I came here, I want to take you back to LA. That’s nice, I said, but why didn’t you call, I would have come and saved you the trip, and Oved said, My Uncle Simcha said that the closer you get the farther you go. I said I didn’t understand. Oved said that neither did he but remember his Uncle Simcha was a prophet. Oved bought an old Oldsmobile from a repossessed car lot. The price of each car there was just the remaining outstanding payments plus something to cover overhead. We drove to Los Angeles. Corn, cows, horses, alfalfa, and wheat. Just one kiss for a cow. A farmer who told us the story of his murdered wife. The same old motels with their lifeless rooms. We went down to Utah and instead of driving directly to Nevada or Idaho or California, Oved wanted to go to Arizona, and not to cross it from east to west, but from north to south. We began driving through Arizona from north to south because, Oved said, of two reasons: First, he had a friend he wanted to talk to who lived in Phoenix, and second, he knew a shortcut to Nevada and that when we got to Nevada we’d find the car we’d left at Mojave and come up with or just invent some kind of paper or document that would convince the police to let us take it back and I’d drive the Buick and he’d drive the Dodge. The color of the land changed. Hours to Phoenix. Not far from the Grand Canyon we saw flocks of birds and the guy in Phoenix didn’t really know who Oved actually was and what he wanted. The guy thought that someone would be coming to deliver him the Mayan urns he’d asked for, while Oved thought the guy would be able to tell him where to find some Mayan urns next time he went down to Guatemala. The whole thing could have been sorted out by two phone calls, but Oved loved sneaking up on an idea and pouncing without warning on whatever it was he thought he might be planning, or wanted to think he might be planning. We left town for the desert. After a day’s driving we sat down for a few minutes in a small diner and had something to eat. The sky was clear and the sun was shining and from a distance we could see the huge yuccas and the adobe houses the people here had learned to build from the Indians, and I looked at the map and reminded Oved that Nevada was north and we were going in the opposite direction, but he said that the scenery was interesting and that there was a place nearby whose name he couldn’t recall where there was a house he just had to see. I didn’t argue. A day more, a day less. The talk with Lee could wait. I saw a small cloud sailing overhead. It looked beautiful, like a bunch of feathers rubbing up against the sky. A few moments later Oved said we should speed up. We were soon doing
about a hundred and twenty miles an hour. The sky gradually darkened. Gray clouds came and black clouds came and there was noise in the sky and eagles could be seen winging away from the rock fissures looking like small fighter planes, a strong wind came up, there was a loud honk, like from within a huge bassoon, and we stopped the car. We saw the storm heading for us. Lightning cleft the sky and hit the ground with a bang. The earth trembled. Snakes could be seen squirming out of their burrows and from afar we saw the funnel of a cyclone emerge from the towering clouds, crushing everything in its way, magnificent. The funnel whirled out of the sky, very wide at its top as its narrow end reached for the earth and hit it and everything went mad, the car began sailing backward. Oved jumped out and stopped it rolling down who knows where. It was a sky-quake at the same time as an earthquake. Then the clouds began dispersing. Torrential rain fell for a few minutes, the sun even came out for a moment, then the sky darkened again and we heard thunder and it began to hail. A vast rainbow sliced open the sky and the sun reemerged from the clouds. We drove quickly to the spot where the cyclone had hit and reached a small town. Destroyed houses. Overturned cars, one hanging from a tree bent over beneath its weight. A gas station at the entrance of the ruined town. The roof had blown off and we saw it stuck in the ground not far away. On the main street people were lying crushed under a roof that had landed on them. Not far away a young woman was trying to free one arm from where it was pinned by a beam from what had evidently been her house, while in her other arm was a baby sucking at her nipple. At that moment another wall collapsed and Oved pulled her and the baby out and she was saved from being crushed beneath a wall that was just a bunch of shattered adobe now and the earth was sending out a hot vapor, it was burning inside, fires could be seen starting and going out again all around town, people were running in a panic, the sheriff came by and saw us saving the woman and shouted, Come with me. We helped him get a few more people out from under the rubble, they crawled out from what remained of their homes, terrified, and only one building remained intact: the town hall. The mayor came running and stopped by the sheriff who was trying to restore order in the general panic. The mayor thanked us and brought a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and we said something about sorrow and he said, You build rockets and go into space and fly airplanes at supersonic speeds and crack the brain’s secrets and with a giant telescope you see the point where the universe begins and where time ends and then along comes the Good Lord and shows us who’s really in charge—nothing made by man could ever destroy a place like this, even a little town that’s barely on the map, in so little time…
We drove on and stopped the car at the Nevada state line. It was unbearably hot. Oved said that if he were a chicken he’d eat himself roasted. We drove on through scenery that soon became monotonous and Oved’s silences didn’t much help pass the time. Oved had three expressions he liked to use, the rest of the time he kept quiet. When he got into a traffic jam he’d say, What’s this, a funeral? When he couldn’t find a house he was looking for he’d say, They’ve moved the house, because when he first came to California from Gedera he’d seen a house on the back of a truck, and then for no reason at all he liked to talk about “The List” in Vegas and how he’d gotten onto it. Now he said, They’ve moved the first desert to the second. I laughed because I knew that if I didn’t I was a goner. There was music in the car. We finally reached the Mojave Desert that we could have reached two days earlier and saved a lot of gas if we’d only come direct and we went right to the police station. It was noon and everything was quiet. Everyone was hiding in their air-conditioned lairs. Our cop came along. He laughed and patted us on our backs and said, I’d started to think you wouldn’t make it. We had a hamburger with him in the small diner that was empty at the time and we had a drink and gave him the bottle of bourbon we’d been given by the mayor, as if it was a gift we’d bought specially for him as a token of our esteem, and he said that only a few people he’d arrested had ever given him a present, actually none at all, and he thanked us. He brought the Dodge around and said, You’ve probably got all the paperwork now, and Oved said in his sleepy voice, Of course we do, just give me a second to find it, but the cop apparently took pity on us and didn’t ask us to show him and so we carried on, me driving the Buick with Oved stuttering along behind me in the Dodge that didn’t know it was on its last journey because on the outskirts of LA it started to limp. I saw it in the rearview mirror and pulled over. Oved got out drenched with sweat and said, Blessed Be the True Judge, and abandoned the car. In any case nobody knows who it really belongs to, he said, and it’s died its final death. We got to Oved and Hanoch’s house and all the guys came over right away. In the meantime Handsome David had found an American woman who thought his English was broken and who didn’t know that every language he spoke was broken. She married him and was in the movie business. He said he gotten a green card and now he was a film producer and according to what was written on his business card he was really slumming by hanging out with us: Handsome David Productions. And Valerie came down from the dovecote and told Oved she’d missed him and he replied, Hmmm, who, me? You missed me? And she cried. She was paper-thin. When she stood in profile all you could see was hair and a head and feet, all the rest became part of the scenery. Oved gave a brief report on our trip and the moment the Brothers Karamazov heard that we hadn’t met a single Viennese woman they fell asleep, bored, because any sentence of more than six words without Viennese women in it was too long for them. Hanoch told a story about the war. About a certain event that had happened to him when I was with him in the same platoon and I’d made a laughingstock of myself because I wanted justice, and then Oved smiled and Valerie tried to hug him and he went outside with her, went up into the dovecote with her and slept there. In the morning Oved declared that my driving the Buick without a license had been a success and he took me for a driving test. I went in and they gave me a paper filled with yes or no questions. I guessed right and a tired man took me out for a drive. It was the first time I’d driven in a big city and he asked me to park. I had nothing to lose so I parked. And then he said, Make a right. I made a right. Make a left. I made a left. Stop. Go. Have a nice day, you’ve passed. I had a mug shot taken right there and I paid and was given a license. Oved was pleased, because his license had been revoked so many times that it would be better, considering what had happened in Mojave, that he drive around with someone who had a license. Fat Paul came with Harry Gemora who brought a girl who wanted to be a star and meet Handsome David the producer. Paul asked if we’d found our police station in the Mojave Desert and Oved said, No, they moved it. Everybody laughed, including the actress who had a pretty good figure and nice-sized breasts, but Paul, for the first time after all those years, didn’t laugh. Oved tried him again and again he didn’t laugh. Oved turned white for a moment, looking at Paul. Waiting. Oved had a drink then and told us almost casually that on his last trip to Guatemala City he’d gone with the Dutchman, and along the way they’d seen a flower market. The Dutchman, who loved cows and flowers, said that they had the latest thing there, flowers made of plastic that looked real and cost ten cents a dozen. We didn’t really understand why Oved was talking about flowers, but Paul went pale and asked for a drink and he downed it and then his voice became weak and he whispered, They were beautiful? Like real ones? And Oved replied, Paul, absolutely like the real thing. The Guatemalans are renowned flower lovers and they buy those fake things like crazy. The younger Karamazov brother said, What? Like in Austria? And Oved said, Even more so. And they’re like real ones, I’d bet anyone a hundred dollars that they can’t tell the difference. He knew that nobody there had a hundred dollars so he was on safe ground, and besides, his system worked and was just waiting to cash in once he had a little money to get to Reno, this time with a bigger safety net, so what did it matter what he said. Fat Paul’s face was the most interesting thing about Oved’s story. First his features seemed to sink inward as though trying to reach the bottom of his
soul, then he began quivering more and more, his huge ears flapping hither and yon. I kept watching him, there was nothing else too exciting to look at in there, notwithstanding the big-shot producer whose nose had started running because the effort of following the conversation had gotten him all worked up. Then Paul really collapsed in on himself, his face seemed about to be torn apart by muscles pulling every which way, desperate and uncontrollable like the cyclone that had been sent down by the Hand of God, his eyebrows were seeking a foothold in his eyelashes and his big belly seemed to expand and his feet tapped the floor and he managed, after much effort, to get some sounds out, and now he was clearing his throat so that some actual words might follow. Almost whispering, with his body trembling, he asked, How much? How much? And Oved said, Ten cents a dozen. And what color? All colors. Lilies? Sure. What else? Roses. Narcissi, and more. Where? In the market. And is there a factory there? There is, plastic flowers don’t grow by themselves. Paul began straightening up in his seat. His eyes opened wide as if he’d just witnessed a miracle and Oved said that his Uncle Simcha had said, That’s just what Moses looked like when he saw God on Mount Sinai. I looked at Paul and saw the lust in him. Paul grabbed the notebook that Oved had taken notes in with all his odd and even numbers for the system in Las Vegas and began scribbling. Everybody was staring at him. He was apotheosized. His belly was flat. A light sparkled in his eyes. We all agreed, later, that we had never seen anything like light in his eyes before. Yes, his eyes and even his hair all radiated great excitement and he started talking slowly, but gradually his pace increased and in the end he was actually chasing the words because they were faster than him now: Ten cents times a hundred thousand times two million times three, times four less expenses, ships, planes, trains, New York, Brussels, Paris, London, Tokyo. A global empire. After a few minutes Paul had already dispatched a fleet of ships and trains and planes and trucks to the four corners of the earth, selected possible ports, calculated how many people would be working in his company, how much each of them would earn, he said there’ll be no employee discounts, salaries are best so the staff doesn’t steal, It’s a matter of principle for me, he said, and we’ll have representatives in Guatemala City for security, each of them will be given shares in the company—Paul was talking as though in shock. He excused himself and ran outside and said, Wait for me, wait. And we waited. All of us, that is, except for the Brothers Karamazov. One of the reasons they’re so wealthy today and have built thousands of homes in Los Angeles without ever really saying a word is that they never stopped to think about anything, which just makes everyone else think they’re brilliant. We thought that Paul might have suffered a psychotic attack and Hanoch said we should call Susie, whose father was the brother of a psychiatrist, and I thought about calling Dr. Morrison in the Hollywood Hills with his four hospitals to ask for help.